“If God had intended us to fly, he'd have never given us railways,” said English humorist Michael Flanders. In the fall of 2018. I and sixteen dedicated undergraduates searched for but failed to find a stand-alone “China” railway book, in any language, for our history course: “Empire on Railways: Great Britain, the United States, and China.” Although China imported railroads 140 years ago and is currently on top in the global railway game, we still could only use articles and book chapters for the China story. Good news: this glaring gap is now closed by Elisabeth Köll's Railroads and the Transformation of China.
Köll organizes her writing like a good railroad manager: with precision, discipline, and efficiency. The century-long saga is told through eight chapters that each cover a decade or two with distinctive turning points. The chapter titles also include keywords such as technology transfer, knowledge dissemination, market space, and crisis management—helpful hints for topic reading. The introduction and conclusion are both concise, with little overlap or repetition. Even the most time-scarce reader could trace a carousel of nine maps—visual translations of the author's original findings—to compare Chinese railroad development in the years 1900, 1912, 1920, 1928, 1935, 1942, 1957, 1975, and 2011.
Railroads were among a select few institutional structures that survived and continued from China's imperial past through its semicolonial, republican, wartime, socialist, and finally “Chinese-style” capitalistic present. How did the railroad development endure to affect the transformation of China? At the risk of oversimplifying Köll's comprehensive and intricate explanation, we examine three touchstones on Chinese railroads: as administrative units, as business enterprises, and as a comprehensive knowledge system. Railroads “emerged in tandem” with the modern Chinese state rather than “building on a preexisting scaffolding of systems and institutions” (p. 131). The relationship resembled the bond of siblings close in age more than that of child/parent. The big brother (the Chinese state) had to fight a battle of legitimacy with limited resources; the younger brother (railroads) followed the lead but mostly had to fend for itself with ad hoc incentives. When they both came out of the battle, railroad functionality had become a symbol of the new “mandate of heaven” for the Chinese state: proud, unified, and industrially ambitious. The symbiotic existence and tug of war for regional control persisted.
Political attachments aside, Chinese railroads were still business institutions and the closest thing to large-scale managerial capitalism in the pre-1949 economy. Köll details in chapters 3 and 4 how railroads adjusted routes for major export commodities, shared labor costs with logistics companies, and diversified into the tourism industry—all endeavors to generate revenue despite extraordinary circumstances. But she also does not hesitate to tell the blunt truth that “from a financial perspective, the Chinese railroad sector today performs little better than it did during the pre-1949 period” (p. 292). After all, there were fundamental problems: passenger transportation and freight transportation competed for the same limited number of tracks; the tracks could not expand without investments; and the government would not give up state control in exchange for private ownership.
Köll's book, for all its merits, does seem to have one weak link: it contains many names, but few memorable personalities. The missing personalities probably result from a tradeoff between limits on length and the necessary clarification for the third and most subtle component of institutional railroad development in China—forming a knowledge system. The transfer of new equipment and technically trained staff for China's first railroads brought with them a new engineering knowledge system. More railroads prompted the Chinese state to create a wholesale education establishment—like Shanghai's Jiaotong University (literally Transportation/Communications University)—for training professional technicians and managers. The culture of rail travel also cultivated ordinary citizens’ expectations for punctuality, hygiene, economic efficiency, and technological advances. Rail development as a knowledge institution in China was an incremental process that went beyond the control of any individuals.
Nevertheless, the socialist period of Chinese railroads was filled with rage and hope. A new breed of railroad man, railroad army corps (tiedaobing), carried out construction projects in all environs, despite harsh living conditions, local isolation, and frequent forced movement. Railroad networks finally grew out the “comfort zone”—the core areas of the Yangzi River, the Pearl River delta, and the Northeast—and expanded into China's sparsely populated and underdeveloped western, southern, and central regions, even reaching sensitive border areas with the Soviet Union, India, and Vietnam. After turbulent political campaigns such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, the entire sector reached institutional peak and resembled “a state within a state” (see Köll's vivid description of “railroad compounds” within cities and provinces) by the 2000s, until the almighty Ministry of Railways was broken by scandal and debt. Köll ends her narrative with a timely comparison of two master railroad plans proposed by, respectively, Sun Yat-sen in 1921 and Premier Li Keqiang in 2016; China has rounded a circle from being on the receiving end of global railroad standards to being on the giving side, with the African continent as its foremost test ground.
In time, Köll's book could lead to the emergence of a field of Chinese railroad studies just as the First Transcontinental Railroad led to the spatial magnification of America. The Transcontinental Railroad not only connected the United States “from sea to shining sea” but also inspired the birth of at least eight continental-length routes in the following decades; these routes ultimately formed the physical scaffold of a vast new nation. Similarly, Köll integrates the institutional railroad development into modern Chinese history, both in the prose and in her meticulous notes discussing the existing archives and scholarship related to the cultural, social, financial, and technological aspects of Chinese railroads. The sixty pages of notes alone are worth the price of the book, and many topics we thought we knew—gender, machines, space, capitalism, social stratification—are connected and expanded through the fresh lens of railroad history. In sum, this new field will be big enough for all of us, thanks to a business historian's effective research and prose.
